Blocks
by Sephulbadis
Summary: Some days, even Otacon can't get a dang thing done. Some days, Snake destroys a dairy farm. Please R&R.
1. Hacker's Block

DISCLAIMER: I do not own Snake and Otacon, or any rights to them other than the right to make snide commentary while someone's playing.  
  
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The coffee pot phut-phutted in the kitchen, announcing it was done with another pot. It sounded tired. World-weary, almost, as though from its perch on the counter it could see the long string of future brews stretched out interminably in front of it. It couldn't, of course, since not even Otacon had a coffee maker equipped with an AI. It would be cruel.  
  
Click. Click. Click.  
  
"Dang."  
  
Click.  
  
"God. The bomb's –never- in the corner. Is there any justice in the world?"  
  
Click clicketty click click click.  
  
"Pathetic."  
  
He sighed, stood up from the computer and slouched irritably into the kitchen for a fresh cup. It had been a long night. It had been a long morning, for that matter, and it looked to be a nigh-eternal afternoon. He hadn't been busy. Quite the opposite, in fact. And the apartment had been mercilessly distraction-free, to boot. Snake hadn't come out of the spare room. It was possible he wasn't even in there, what with the window. It wouldn't be the first time he'd exfiltrated.  
  
This was hell.  
  
"You never have any existential dilemmas about making coffee, do you?" Staring blankly at the pot was something of a respite from staring blankly at the screen. Unfortunately, it was mute. He drank coffee at it.  
  
He checked the fridge. There was nothing in the fridge.  
  
What he needed to do was get out for once. Go for a walk, maybe. There was a greenhouse downtown that sold bonsai—maybe he ought to go get one. It would be kind of like having a pet, but without all the hair. He'd seen pictures of cherry bonsai, with full-sized red fruit hanging from ridiculously small branches. Those were neat, now. Maybe he could get one to do that.  
  
Bah. He'd kill it. He'd forget to water it, or put it in the sun wrong, and in three days he'd have a very small, very expensive tree-skeleton. Then he'd forget to throw it out and it would sit on a windowsill for months gathering dead flies. Eventually Snake would take it out on the balcony and use it as an ashtray. He checked the balcony. Sure enough—it was still raining, raining big cold drops. The sky, as far as the surrounding buildings would permit, looked misty and grey to the horizon.  
  
Another refill, and it was back to the computer.  
  
Click.  
  
Click.  
  
The front door rattled, and opened.  
  
"Fine," Otacon snapped. "Don't knock. Walk –right- in. It's not like I value my privacy or anything."  
  
"Minesweeper?" Snake crossed the living room, leaving wet craters in the low carpet, and leaned over Otacon's shoulder. There were a few windows open: a couple of text logs, a sound-editor file of some sort, and a webpage devoted to semiprecious lapidary techniques. The eight-by eight grid and the yellow smiley overlapped all of them. The timer counted up from 338 as Snake watched.  
  
"Go away. You're dripping." Otacon elbowed Snake in the stomach without any particular enthusiasm.  
  
"Hard at work, huh?" Snake retreated to the kitchen.  
  
"No, I am –not-, as it happens." Otacon leaned back and rubbed at his eyes. His hands were cold. "I am –not- hard at work. I have been sitting here –not working- for six hours. And prior to that, I was –not working- for four hours, minus thirty minutes to take a shower. Where were you?"  
  
"Out. Hacker's block again?" Snake returned with a cup of his own. It was the mug with cows on it.  
  
"God. Yes." A click rid the screen of that baleful little smiley. Otacon propped his forehead on one hand. "It's bad, Snake. I can't –think-."  
  
"Relax," said Snake, flopping onto the couch. "There's nothing urgent right now, anyway." He sipped, and winced. Only Otacon could make espresso- strength in a drip brewer.  
  
"But if there –was-…" Otacon felt his eyes sting. This was so –frustrating- !  
  
"There isn't. I promise. You wanna go get lunch? There's that sushi joint down the street."  
  
"Yeah. I need to get out. I really do." An alarming series of cracks and pops accompanied Otacon out of the chair and down the hall to his bedroom, where his jacket hung from the doorknob. Back, knees, neck, and wrists. He was going to fall apart into a dry, bony heap any day now. No point in going on, really. He might as well go stand in front of the microwave until cancer set in, just to make –sure-.  
  
"Come on. Fish is brain food, you know." Snake already had his coat back on. When Otacon got in a funk, he lost about four inches in height. It was cute and pathetic at the same time, like a kicked puppy. If he could manage the same look when he wasn't too depressed to talk to them, Snake pondered, he'd probably be hip-deep in women.  
  
Outside, conditions hadn't improved. Still raining, still chilly and wet, but at least it was outside. Otacon felt his spirits lift, marginally.  
  
"Sorry, Snake," he began. "Things just aren't firing right today."  
  
"Don't worry about it," said Snake magnanimously, taking the opportunity of a favorable headwind to blatantly light up a cigarette. "It happens to everybody."  
  
"Yeah, I suppose it would."  
  
"You remember the Gear in development outside Vancouver? The one that eventually fell out of the grain silo into the dairy farm?" Inwardly, Snake grimaced. Outwardly, he smoked.  
  
"What about it?"  
  
"That's what happens when I get infiltrator's block."  
  
"Oh."  
  
  
  
  
  
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I may continue this, I may not. Depends primarily on whether anyone really wants to read about Snake's off day and a few cows who were never the same again. Hope you liked it so far! 


	2. Infiltrator's Block

DISCLAIMER: I don't own Snake, Otacon, Bag Balm, or Canada. Just so you know. Furthermore, Snake's account of The Cow Op is not intended to be angsty at all. Please forgive the inconsistency.  
  
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Supplied with a spicy tuna roll, Otacon felt much better indeed. Almost human. Snake had his sukiyaki. Both had tea, because drinking anything else would have been damned silly.  
  
"You know I can't see what you're actually –doing- more than half the time when you're out in the field, right?" Otacon levered a lump of sushi into his mouth. "Usually it's just GPS, third-party radio reports, and your biometric data."  
  
"Mm-hm." Slurp.  
  
"So what the heck –was- going on in Vancouver, Snake?"  
  
"Er. Well…"  
  
  
  
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It was a ridiculously wholesome area, according to the photographs. An agricultural belt about fifteen kilometres wide between Vancouver and the Canadian-American border, there wasn't much there but farms and the occasional livestock yard. It was a nice, green place, especially in mid- spring when everything that could sprout leaves had already done it. In the late-afternoon sun, it looked like a pastoral dream.  
  
According to Snake, it looked remarkably like the underside of a cow. This was ridiculous.  
  
On one hand, it was better to pull a Ulysses with an overweight ruminant than to risk alerting anyone monitoring the surveillance cameras that undoubtedly scanned the barn at that very moment. On the other hand, and to Snake it was a heavy hand indeed, it would also be better if it had occurred to these damned Canadian anarcho-hyper-eco-anti-whatever freaks to put their development lab someplace better-smelling and hospitable, preferably with nachos. Or pierogies. Didn't Canadians have this thing for pierogies?  
  
In fact, he decided as his camouflage swatted her tail around his midsection, it would be well-nigh ideal if they'd opted to build the Gear in the spare bedroom of Otacon's apartment. Yes, that would have been nice. He just didn't feel like infiltrating today. He felt like sleeping in, watching some bad karate movies, and ordering pizza.  
  
Instead, he got a –cow-. Gah.  
  
BREEP BREEP  
  
"Hi, Snake. How's it going so far?"  
  
"Why don't we do this next week?"  
  
"The Gear could be operational any day, that's why. What's wrong?"  
  
"…nothing."  
  
"Good. There's a hatch in the floor about thirty feet—whoops, you're in Canada, hang on—a little over nine metres to your left."  
  
"Security?"  
  
"Minimal. On the hatch, anyway. Can't have livestock setting it off. Further in there's another, and a phone-style keypad. Just spell out 'NOTACOW'."  
  
"What the hell kind of passcode is that, Otacon?"  
  
"Not intended for cows, obviously."  
  
He signed off, and nudged his heifer with a toe. It meandered obediently in more or less the proper direction. What a day. What a –great- day.  
  
"Move it, Bessie," he grumbled. Bessie moved.  
  
The hatch came up easily. Above him, Bessie chewed on her cud with a vast bovine indifference to the world and to him, which was just as well. The encounter had already grown more intimate than he was entirely comfortable with, and there was Bag Balm on his suit in places he didn't want to think too hard about. He dropped down.  
  
Sure enough, once the upper hatch was closed, a bare bulb set in a socket in the wall lit. There was the short ladder down, the second hatch—more like a door, actually, which looked like it had come out of an office building somewhere—and the keypad, into which he punched the appropriate numbers. He was not a cow, he reflected. No, definitely not a cow. Maybe an oryx, whatever that was. It sounded like the kind of beast that roamed the veldt eating giraffes. He wished –he- was roaming the veldt. It was probably sunny, there.  
  
Fifteen minutes later, his brain adrift with visions of long grass waving above bloody chunks of gazelle, Snake was startled by an abrupt BREEP BREEP.  
  
"Snake?"  
  
"Yeah?"  
  
"What are you –doing-?"  
  
"Waiting."  
  
"For what, a bus?"  
  
"Thought I heard something."  
  
"That was me. I've been trying to call you for five minutes."  
  
"Oh."  
  
"Just go through the hatch. Take a left at the bottom. All right?"  
  
"Right."  
  
Luckily, he didn't have to affirm again that he wasn't a cow. The hatch opened, and after another short ladder descent Snake found himself at the head of a moderately long hallway lit by intermittent bulbs set in the ceiling. The place looked like an advertisement for a corrugated siding company—everything was grey and ribbed. It made his stomach uneasy.  
  
BREEP BREEP  
  
"I'm through the hatch, Otacon."  
  
"Oh, good. You should be in a-"  
  
"Giant condom, right."  
  
"Snake?"  
  
"Sorry. What?"  
  
"Halfway down the hall there's a door to the right. That's their machine shop and surveillance. Don't bother. Keep going straight, and you should run right into the Gear's assembly bay. From aboveground, it's a grain silo."  
  
"Otacon?"  
  
"Yeah, Snake?"  
  
"Am I really sneaking under a dairy farm to destroy a Gear built by a bunch of grassroots psychos out of scrap metal, or did I fall asleep watching an Ed Wood movie again?"  
  
"You're really there. At least the GPS says you are."  
  
"Call my place and check, would you? Just to be sure."  
  
"I'll get right on it, Snake."  
  
He signed off again, feeling better. If he had to sneak eighty yards—dammit, seventy-three metres—and destroy several tons of deadly machinery before he could go home and see about a sandwich and a cold one, then by God he would sneak!  
  
He snuck. Where –was- everyone, anyway? Nobody in the machine shop—and no sounds suggestive of machinery or industry in the dim bay ahead. It would have been eerie, if it wasn't so inescapably lame.  
  
BREEP BREEP  
  
"Hm? Wha?"  
  
"Where are the grassroots psychos, Otacon?"  
  
Otacon's daemon wasn't programmed to grin its head off, but Snake could –hear- it. It was a smug one, too.  
  
"Guess."  
  
"No."  
  
"Come on."  
  
"No."  
  
"All right, all right. Stars versus Canucks in the second round of playoffs. Home game."  
  
Snake stopped in his tracks. It couldn't be. It –couldn't-. It would just be too damned Canadian. Too damned Canadian, and it would mean he'd clung to the udder of a strange cow for almost ten minutes to evade the notice of people who had been, and still were, several miles—KILOMETRES, dammit—from their base of operations WATCHING HOCKEY.  
  
The ignominy of it all! Someone, probably Otacon, was going to –suffer- for this.  
  
Without further delay he walked directly down the center of the hall, which was nice for a change, straight through the wide door into the assembly bay, and ruthlessly suppressed an urge to hit something very hard.  
  
It was a Gear, yes. Fully constructed, and not a bad job. Especially considering they'd had to rivet sheet metal together and weld with oxy- acetylene. It had the familiar hunched posture, the right number of extremities, and the bulb in the torso that was –supposed- to contain its power source. Except that it didn't. There was nothing in that bulb but dust.  
  
It had solar panels. Five of them, arrayed around its 'head'. It looked like nothing more than an oversized rice-paddy hat.  
  
BREEP BREEP  
  
"Otacon. I can't destroy this thing."  
  
"Why not? Everything I have says it should still be there, powered down."  
  
"I can't."  
  
"Why –not-, Snake?"  
  
"It's too pathetic."  
  
"Try. Just –try-, all right?"  
  
"…all right."  
  
Sigh. Where was that welding torch? And how to go about it? Snake pondered. A cut here, a few melted struts there, and most –definitely- a wrench applied with a liberal degree of force –there-…yeah, that would about do it. A few cranks on the compressed-gas tanks, a quick spark, and he was in business.  
  
It took a few minutes. He was working on one of the thing's tendon- equivalents when a sharp metallic squeal made his head vibrate, and he noticed for the first time that the Gear's torso betrayed a definite list to the right. And its center of gravity was somewhere closer to its knees. This was not good.  
  
BREEP BREEP  
  
"Snake, is everything okay? Your heart rate just went through the roof."  
  
"Ah, right, everything fine. Fine." It was still tilting. A stray flange tore a ragged slash in the silo with the casual effortlessness of something very very heavy moving very very slowly. It looked to be picking up speed, however.  
  
"You sure?"  
  
"Of course I'm sure."  
  
"What's making all that noise, then?"  
  
"OH JESUS IT'S GOING THROUGH THE WALL OH GOD JESUS CHRIST GOD DAMN-"  
  
"Snake!"  
  
It was over in a matter of seconds. With Otacon still panicking into the CODEC, Snake clambered up the twisted remains of a leg onto solid ground. It was bad. Half—no, more like two-thirds—of the Gear sprawled across the dairy yard, splattered thickly with cow excrement and torn grass. The head had come off. It, and its conical solar collector, had landed point-up by the barn itself. It shifted heavily in the mud and emitted a panicked moo.  
  
"It's, ah, it's okay. I'm all right. Gear's taken care of."  
  
"-had better answer or so help me I'm going to see about orbital bombardment…it is? You are?"  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"Good. I'll, um, I'll see you after you get here, then."  
  
"Right."  
  
  
  
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"…and after that, it was just getting through customs."  
  
Otacon shut his mouth. It had been hanging open. "Oh, God," he managed finally.  
  
"So don't worry. Like I said, it happens to everybody." Snake drank his now- cold tea with straight-faced composure.  
  
"Rest assured, I'll sleep -much- better knowing that's what happens when you have a bad day." Otacon shivered. Not that he slept much now. He wasn't going to after this. "-God-, Snake. What if that had happened during the mission in Wichita?"  
  
Snake grinned. "Next time I tell you we should wait a week, are we going to wait a week?"  
  
"Next time, I'm going in myself. Agh."  
  
  
  
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And that is what happened with Snake, the dairy farm, and infiltrator's block. That's all, there ain't no more. 


End file.
